St Botolph's Church, universally known across the fens as Boston Stump for the sheer scale of its tower, ranks among the largest parish churches anywhere in England, and its enormous silhouette dominates the flat surrounding landscape for miles in every direction, a landmark visible long before a traveller actually reaches the town itself. Two quite different traditions have attached themselves to that famous tower over the years, each drawing on a completely different register of English folklore.
The first is genuinely tragic: the ghost of a woman named Sarah Preston, said to have climbed to the top of the tower holding a young child and leapt, driven there by guilt or grief after coming to believe she was personally responsible for bringing the Black Death to the town, having invited a sailor into her home while her own husband was away. Her figure is said to be seen leaping again each autumn, repeating the fall endlessly, vanishing before she ever reaches the ground below, an apparition caught permanently in the single worst moment of her life.
The second story could not be more different in tone, offering a piece of pure, almost playful folk etymology to explain the winds that whip constantly around the tower's great height. Legend holds that the Devil himself was once cornered at this very site by St Botolph, who preached at him so relentlessly and so effectively that all the Devil could manage in response was to huff and puff in frustration, and that the gasps of his ancient irritation have never quite settled since, still stirring the air around the tower to this day. Neither story is documented history in any formal sense, but both have become well established parts of Boston's local identity, told on ghost walks around the town alongside quieter, less developed reports from the Guildhall and the sites of the town's former friary.
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